


glass half something

by triplestar



Category: Soul Eater
Genre: Estranged Familial Relationships, Gen, Implied Relationship, Like A Whole Boatload Of It, Mental Health Issues, internalized ableism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-29
Updated: 2016-09-29
Packaged: 2018-08-18 11:38:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8160866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/triplestar/pseuds/triplestar
Summary: Paranoia isn't always without reason, and the same is true of estrangement. Stein swears that the situation is justified. He's been known to be wrong (Spirit can attest to that much).





	

By this point, it’s no longer his responsibility, a fact which comes as a marked relief. For most people, there would be a biological inclination towards parenthood making itself at home in their prefrontal cortex, but Stein retains an absolute lack of interest in the role he ought to be playing. 

He considers this to be the best outcome. Taking care of someone else requires an empathy and common sense that he never quite got, both in terms of understanding and acquiring. Metaphorically, he watched those seeds of emotional intelligence wither and die. Metaphorically, the ground was always infertile. 

Someone once told him that “this is your bed to lie in,” but Stein is a lifelong insomniac.

There are several factors to be accounted for when making a colossal fucking mistake. Logically, the mistake should have never been made, but lab goggles and chemical showers were not created to serve as window dressing. Stein is a scientist, and scientists know how little it takes for things to go wrong. This is where a contingency plan comes in handy.

Stein’s plan is to remove himself from the equation, and hope against genetic probability that something doesn’t go wrong.

“Everything’s fine,” Spirt assures him when he calls, his voice sounding like a cheap knockoff filtered through static. “I don’t see her much anymore—” Stein can hear the vice clamp snug around his throat. “—but she’d tell me if she had any… you know. I’ll tell you first thing if she does.” 

Stein gives a curt asseveration of assent and lets the line go dead in his hand. ‘Hallucinations’ is such a dirty word.

He’s done the math, of course. The odds of his schizophrenia being passed down are notably lower than either side of a coin toss, a bad bet if ever there was one. But even minute percent variations are considered statistically significant where academic study is concerned, and here he is with the glass one quarter empty. 

“I’m being paranoid, aren’t I?” he asks Azusa with no expectation of a response. The wind whips his remarks into cowed and distorted whispers. A balcony eight stories above a vast hill’s peak is an incommodious place to meet, but the journey up is primarily stairs, thus preventing him from arriving via ‘that one fucking chair.’

Azusa’s face is a marble stop sign. “Yes,” she says, dry and pragmatic. “But you know that you always are. I believe you called it ‘a symptom of a larger clusterfuck.’” 

“Fair enough. In that case, is my paranoia here justified?” 

“I would say so.”

The glass is not a quarter empty. The glass is three parts water and one part poison, and he only hopes that his toxins will sink to the bottom. 

Stein runs a hand through his bangs, his need for a shower slowly dawning on him as he does. “I thought so.”

“If nothing manifests by the time she’s eighteen, you can consider yourself in the clear,” Azusa says, blunt and to the point like classroom chalkboards. “If i’m being frank, however—”

“I’m Frank.”

“Don’t be facetious. She’s still your daughter whether she has your disorders or not. I’ve never understood why you don’t act like it.”

The conversation begins to feel like a costumed recital. There are deviations from the script in some places, and both actors habitually forget their own lines, but Azusa’s playbook is the same one read by Marie, by Spirit, by Sid. Stein can see where the pages are worn.

“Do you want a cigarette?” he asks.

Azusa is an inscrutable portrait behind her wire-framed mask. “I don’t smoke.”

“You don’t drink either,” Stein says, rummaging through the debris of his pockets, “but I’ve seen you do both. At the same time, once. I promise I won’t spoil your image.”

Azusa takes the stick that she’s offered. 

“If there’s anything you’re trying to get off your chest,” she says, choosing her words with the care of a politician, “you should take care of that soon. I leave Death City tomorrow, at which point you’re no longer my problem.”

Stein hands her his lighter. “I know.” 

That’s why he’s chosen to behave as her friend. Eighteen hours from now, Azusa will gate-check his baggage as she gets on her plane, and jettison it quietly halfway across the Atlantic. Azusa is a consummate neat freak, and she loathes holding on to useless things. 

They pause for a moment to watch the smoke curl into the breeze. The silence comes as break for commercials, buying time until the real draw resumes.

Azusa speaks first. “She is still your daughter, Stein.”

Stein sighs out a thick trail of smoke. “I didn’t raise her.”

“That was your choice.”

“And it was the right one. I wasn’t equipped to be someone's father.”

“Are you saying that Spirit was?” The name is uttered with the cadence of a curse.

In colloquial terms learned from late-night game shows, this is called a trick question. No, he wasn’t; he was unprepared and emotionally troubled. Yes, he was; the man was born with a paternal streak three cities wide. The host decides which is wrong. 

Stein presses his buzzer. “He’s done better than I would have. The last time I was responsible for someone, I tore them apart. Any judiciary would find me unfit as a parent.”

“Is that an insanity plea?” Azusa muses. 

“It’s a statement of fact.”

The commercials come back in a chorus of howling gale and tense silence. Stein can see his dark circles in her lenses. 

Thirty-eight seconds later, Azusa relents. “Believe what you want,” she says, putting her out cigarette on a bone-white railing. “You have a duty to that girl, just as I have a duty to this academy. We both have better things to be doing.” She turns on her heel with an automated precision, and abandons her role as armchair advisor. Stein doesn’t bother watching her go. 

She’s right, in a way, but the moral quibbles of parentage fall far from Stein’s purview. No one wants a father widely known to be mad. 

He rounds Maka’s grade up out of charity, and considers his duties done.

**Author's Note:**

> written for the prompt "stein trying to be a dad," and swerving 180 degrees left of what the prompter actually intended, woopsie
> 
> also thx for reading my garbage; i have a writing blog @starpunched on tumblr if you're interested in seeing one post from me per month


End file.
